At the end of each day, Pranish Kantesaria removes the N95 mask, sometimes soiled in saliva and mucus from patients with COVID-19, and returns home from a hospital in Austin, Texas.
Months after the pandemic, Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation’s director of pharmacy said that his family’s life has changed in a trivial and severe way. The constant, bubbly anxiety inspired a turn from the wine to the cocktails. His wife, a physician’s assistant, switched to the night shift so that a father can always be at home with his 1 and 6-year-old children. Kantesaria started financial planning classes in case you ever feel like you need to leave the health industry to protect your child. daughters, one of whom is immunocompromised.
“If one of us brings COVID home, it could end in ICU in a couple of days,” he said.
But while Kantesaria, his wife, 71-year-old mother, and daughters have adjusted to life under the new coronavirus, other Austinites have apparently taken care of their business. Kantesaria told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that it is frustrating to see people at the grocery store or dine in restaurants without masks or proper social distancing.
That’s a common complaint amid a massive surge in COVID-19 cases in a number of states that public experts say reopened too quickly and recklessly, and without following federal recommendations for supplies, testing, and contact tracing. But it is especially evident in Texas, where authorities reported 5,551 new cases on Wednesday, a new record, after breaking the 5,000-case mark for the first time a day earlier.
Increasingly, residents, medical professionals, and public officials say they are concerned that Texas is facing a new frontier of horror, and that no one at the state level is willing to take the necessary steps to stop it.
“Sometimes it seems like no matter what you say or do, no one will care,” Kantesaria said. “We have become more comfortable living with anxiety.”
Governor Greg Abbott, roundly criticized for his aggressive reopening scheme, did little to curb that fear, saying earlier this week that “closing Texas again will always be the last option.”
Still, on Tuesday, Abbott urged Texans to stay home if they can; gave local authorities the power to restrict outdoor gatherings of more than 100 people; and said Texas would create mandatory health standards for child care centers as the rules have been voluntary until now, The Texas Tribune reported.
On Thursday, Abbott took a further step, paused the state’s gradual reopening, and suspended elective surgeries at Bexar, Dallas, Harris and Travis county hospitals.
“COVID-19 is now spreading at an unacceptable rate in Texas, and must be cornered,” Abbott said during a press conference this week.
Reflecting national trends, it is worse in urban centers, with the largest outbreaks in Harris County, Dallas County, and Bexar County. The number of Texas patients hospitalized with COVID-19 more than doubled in just 24 days, totaling 4,389 in total on Wednesday. Travis County, the home of Austin, has reportedly considered local convention centers, stadiums, and other facilities as temporary hospital overflow facilities.
Kantesaria noted the coming and going between state officials and local authorities trying to impose masking, social distancing and other restrictions, a battle that has been raging across the country. To ensure that big city officials proceed with the governor’s swift reopening plan, the state attorney general sent letters to leaders in Dallas, Austin and San Antonio warning that stricter “illegal” local requirements than the orders of the status could be met with legal action.
This week, Abbott urged Texans to wear masks, and recently has given tacit consent for local officials to impose masking requirements on companies, if not in all of their municipalities. It has refused to officially order residents to comply. Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
“It ends up falling on us in the health system,” said Kantesaria. “We are quite alone. The cavalry is not coming. There is no help coming. “
Outside of Austin, things are even bleaker.
Some hospital officials in other parts of the state have already said that intensive care units are near, at capacity or above capacity. The Houston area has extraordinary capacity, with the world’s largest medical center at the Texas Medical Center. But hospitals in the area have already begun transferring COVID-19 patients to a local children’s hospital to help other facilities cope.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday at a city council meeting that 97 percent of the ICU’s capacity in Houston had been filled, 27 percent by COVID-19 patients.
At first, during the stay-at-home order, “we really crushed the curve,” said Dr. Umair A. Shah, executive director of Harris County Public Health, which oversees the Houston area. “But since the reopening of Texas and Mother’s Day, the Memorial Day weekend, the protests, the graduations, Father’s Day, the restaurants that open to 50 percent and the opening of bars and lounges of beauty “, things have gone crazy.
“It is not just where we are today, it is the fact that sometime soon we will have to increase the surge capacity, and there comes a point where it is unsustainable,” Shah said.
And on Tuesday, the Talking Points Memo reported that the federal government was reducing support for seven local testing sites in Texas.
The sites, primarily in Dallas and Houston, previously coordinated in the pandemic to assist local authorities after a series of missteps that led to a national shortage of available or affordable COVID-19 evidence. But the feds will no longer provide test kits, laboratory access, personnel and other costs starting June 30.
Four sites in Houston and Harris counties, with FEMA assistance, provide 2,500 to 3,000 tests per day for the city, Shah said.
“We are really busy at these test sites right now,” he told The Daily Beast.
In a letter to the federal government over the weekend, Shah requested a two-month extension from the Department of Health and Human Services, noting that the county is the third-most populous in the country and home to the largest uninsured population in Texas, where 4.7 million people live.
“It is clear that our current health system may soon be overwhelmed by this pandemic,” Shah wrote in his letter. As he told The Daily Beast on Wednesday: “Given where the trends are going, this would not be the time to lose the ability to test in the community.” The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, hospitalizations in Dallas County have doubled since June 1, Judge Clay Jenkins told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. If federal aid runs out, the metroplex and its surrounding area would lose testing capacity by approximately 2,000 per day. COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death in the county, behind heart disease and cancer, according to Jenkins and local health authorities.
“We have asked our federal partners to continue the association in a different way, to provide us with reagents for our laboratories,” said Jenkins. “If you are not willing to do that, we would like to keep our association as it is now.”
But if that doesn’t work, things could get terrible. And fast.
“If you get sick and need a bed, an ICU, or a ventilator, we have a bed for you,” Jenkins continued. “But if we continue on the path we are on, with no real requirements, in a month we will be in serious trouble.”
Among healthcare providers, there is significant fear, Kantesaria told The Daily Beast. But there is also a kind of increasingly macabre resignation.
As he put it, “Clearly our state has decided: ‘Whatever it is, it is in God’s hands. If people die, people die. “
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